Month: February 2016

I’ve been going to comic book conventions since 2003 and have been audio recording panels and awards since 2005. Along the way creators have spoken about some behind the scenes happenings that don’t always become public knowledge.

On the Comics Can Be Good column at CBR, Brian Cronin writes about the 1993 DC Bloodlines Annuals. In these annuals a new superhero character was created, which was a selling point to get fans to buy these books. The vast majority of these characters were not very popular and went into comic book limbo almost immediately after their appearance. The same thing happened with the 1993 Marvel Annuals that had new characters in them too.

Creator Mike Grell wrote the Green Arrow Annual #6 and came up with a character called The Hook. Grell was at the 2008 Toronto Hobbystar ComiCON and was on a panel along with Bob Layton and David Michelinie. It was called The Men of Iron / Sketch Off Panel where Layton and Grell did sketches and all 3 talked about their careers, focusing mainly on their time on Iron Man. The panel was moderated by Blake Bell.

The conversation drifted towards working with editors and around the 37:30 mark, David Michelinie spoke about declining to work on the Marvel annual (he was writing Amazing Spider-Man at the time). Mike Grell spoke about working on the Green Arrow Annual #6.

Michelinie: I remember one year in the annuals. (…) One year they had everybody create a new character which Marvel would then own. So I declined to do the annual that year. You always have a choice. You can always say no.

Grell: DC had that policy. There was a line of books that they did. They mandated that everybody had to create a new character and by the way, it was work for hire and DC owned the character. Being a professional prostitute [laughter from the panel] I did, but I accidentally created a good one. I had already sent in the outline for the story as soon as it went in I went “OH CRAP! THAT’S A GOOD CHARACTER!” [Laughter] I got on the phone with the editor and I unsold it. [Lots of Laughter] The character that I created, I convinced them it wasn’t very good. The character I created, the one that showed up in print was this war veteran who had a prosthetic hand or a prosthesis and when he would active his power, his hook would become this giant hook/claw thing that could cut through anything. By the time I’m done the editor was going “Yeah that’s great! That’s great!” *Whew!* that was close.

Marvel and DC likely did this because of Image Comics. They began publishing in 1992 and very quickly became the #3 publisher in the industry. Image was creating lots of new characters that had fans excited. Marvel and DC likely wanted to counter with their own “exciting” new characters but didn’t want to pay creators for them. So they got what they got. I should say that not all characters to come from this were a bust. Garth Ennis and John McCrea created Hitman, who had a well loved solo series.

I can’t speak for all creators, but I think with a lot of creators would really hate to have created a character and have it earn all sorts of money and none (or very little) of it going to them. It bothers them a lot and it can bother them for the rest of their lives. Much like if somebody broke into your house and stole your prized possession and then flaunted it in front of you at every chance they got for the rest of your life and you can’t do anything about it. The pain is such they’d rather not have created the character at all.

Plus there is always the possibility that they might use the character in a situation where it’s much more agreeable to them. It could be with another publisher or even the same publisher with different editorial policy down the line. Some creators work in other mediums like prose books, cartoons, video games, etc.. and those other fields may provide better deals. There is simply no reason for creators to provide good characters to non paying publishers if they think they’re going to regret the decision.

I have yet to see the new Deadpool movie, but by all accounts it’s very popular and people are loving it.

The new movie reminds me of the previous Deadpool appearance in the film X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In that movie we first see Ryan Reynolds play Deadpool and people were happy in the early part of the movie because he got the snappy patter part down. The sucky part was at the end, where they made Deadpool the main villain for Wolverine and changed him.

Don’t get sick.

As more than one person mentioned, they took the ‘Merc with the Mouth’ and removed the mouth.

What the new Deadpool movie popularity shows is why they did this. Imagine if they had Deadpool, as he is in the recent movie, battle Wolverine at the end? Would everybody want to see the hero of the movie Wolverine win? As popular as Hugh Jackman and Wolverine is I think an extended fight scene against classic non stop black humor joking Deadpool would not have worked out so well for him in his own movie. So they decided to change Deadpool into a character that you wouldn’t like and did so by taking away his mouth and his costume. Now it’s clear, cheer for Wolverine and boo the bad Deadpool.

You may think they shouldn’t have had Wolverine fight Deadpool in the first place and I agree. Superhero movies always seem to want the villains to have some sort of connection to the characters origin. Examples being the Joker being the one that killed Bruce Wayne’s parents in the first Michael Keaton Batman movie or the hamfisted Sandman connection to Uncle Ben’s death in the 3rd Tobey MaGuire Spider-Man film. The Wolverine movie was supposed to be about Wolverine’s origin and they already used Sabretooth in the first X-Men film. While Sabretooth plays a major role in this film, he was last seen by movie goers as a fairly minor player in the first X-men film who gets killed. This makes Sabretooth an unsatisfying final villain for this film. Another major villain with origin ties was Lady Deathstrike, but she was used and killed in the 2nd X-men film. None of the other characters on the “Team X” would work as the main villain either.

I also think felt they had to tie into the Weapon X story line since it’s so featured so much in the 2nd X-men film. There was backstory there and this movie was to fill it. Ideally, they would have done a better job with Sabretooth in the first X-men film (have him kick Wolverine around some then disappear) and used him in the 2nd in a similar way to set him up as the big bad Wolverine specific villain you wanted to see him go up against. Hindsight is 20/20 though, I imagine when they were making the first X-men film they were just hoping the movie wouldn’t bomb and were not planning for a solo Wolverine movie 9 years later. So with all other options gone, they decided the main villain had to be Deadpool, but a version of Deadpool that wouldn’t be liked and that’s what we got.

Personally, I’d have liked to see Wendigo be the big villain for the first Wolverine movie. He ties into Wolverine’s first appearance in Hulk #180 & 181 but there obviously wouldn’t have had the Hulk in a FOX movie. They could have brought in Shaman from Alpha Flight to explain/deal with the ‘human soul trapped with the Wendigo curse’ bit. If they go a little further than the comics did at the time and add in the cannibalism part of the origin it would have been a horror movie element to the film, making it stand out. I know when they do movie rights specific characters are put into groupings and I don’t know that Wendigo would have been in the X-men grouping or the Hulk’s grouping since the character has appeared in both characters stories over the years, not to mention many other Marvel characters. The same goes with Shaman, I have no idea of Alpha Flight are their own grouping or if they are part of the X-men.

Over the last few months there have been many, many websites with “Best of 2015” lists concerning comic books and graphic novels. If you’ve looked at a few, you may have noticed some of the same books on different lists and seen some unique to only that list.

I went through 94 different “Best Of” Lists regarding comic books and graphic novels and combined them into a spreadsheet. There are 1,822 different listings of books from these websites. I should note that I included books that were given honorable mentions. In short, if somebody thought it was a good book that you should check out, it’s on here. Pivot tables have been created to show which books appeared on the number of lists. Here are the books with 5 or more recommendations, starting with a tie for the top spot with 25 recommendations:

Book Title

Count

Writer

Artist

Publisher

Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection

25

Kate Beaton

Kate Beaton

Drawn & Quarterly

Ms. Marvel

25

G. Willow Wilson

Adrian Alphona

Marvel Comics

SuperMutant Magic Academy

24

Jillian Tamaki

Jillian Tamaki

Drawn & Quarterly

Nimona

24

Noelle Stevenson

Noelle Stevenson

Harper Collins

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

23

Ryan North

Erica Henderson

Marvel Comics

March: Book Two

21

John Robert Lewis, Andrew Aydin

Nate Powell

Top Shelf

Killing and Dying

21

Adrian Tomine

Adrian Tomine

Drawn & Quarterly

Bitch Planet

20

Kelly Sue DeConnick

Valentine De Landro

Image Comics

The Wicked + The Divine

20

Kieron Gillen

Jamie McKelvie

Image Comics

Paper Girls

20

Brian K. Vaughan

Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

Saga

20

Brian K. Vaughan

Fiona Staples

Image Comics

Southern Bastards

19

Jason Aaron

Jason Latour

Image Comics

Lumberjanes

16

Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson

Brooke Allen

Boom!

The Sculptor

15

Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud

First Second

Descender

15

Jeff Lemire

Dustin Nguyen

Image Comics

The Story of My Tits

15

Jennifer Hayden

Jennifer Hayden

Top Shelf

The Sandman: Overture

14

Neil Gaiman

J.H. Williams III

DC Comics/Vertigo

Two Brothers

14

Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

Dark Horse Comics

Archie

13

Mark Waid

Fiona Staples, Annie Wu

Archie Comics

Secret Wars

13

Jonathan Hickman

Esad Ribic

Marvel Comics

The Fade Out

12

Ed Brubaker

Sean Phillips

Image Comics

The Divine

12

Boaz Lavie

Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka

First Second

The Multiversity

12

Grant Morrison

Frank Quitely, Ivan Reis and Jim Lee

DC Comics/Vertigo

Black River

11

Josh Simmons

Josh Simmons

Fantagraphics Books

Batgirl

11

Brenden Fletcher and Cameron Stewart

Babs Tarr

DC Comics/Vertigo

The Omega Men

11

Tom King

Barnaby Bagenda and Toby Cypress

DC Comics/Vertigo

Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist

11

Bill Griffith

Bill Griffith

Fantagraphics Books

Wytches

11

Scott Snyder

Jock

Image Comics

Sacred Heart

10

Liz Suburbia

Liz Suburbia

Fantagraphics Books

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir

Also of note, a handful of reviewers included a webcomic within it’s best books lists. There was a clear winner with Lighten Up by Ronald Wimberly getting picked by 4 websites. Every other webcomic was only picked once.

Where websites broke up their lists into parts, I’ve counted that as 1 list.

Where a website does more than 1 list (say best Comic Books and best Graphic Novels) I’ve counted that as two separate lists.

Where a writer wrote ‘best of’ lists for multiple websites, I’ve cross referenced their lists and removed books that were named twice. I did not think it would be fair if those writers could tip the popularity scale by naming the same book(s) over and over again on multiple websites.

If a writer wrote for multiple sites, but one of those sites picks was a group effort, I did not remove books that are listed twice.

I did not include lists that were a mixed of prose books and graphic novels.

I did not use nominations for upcoming awards.

There were also a couple of “Best Books for 2016” lists that I did not include.

For simplicity sake, if a list named a specific comic book issue or specific volume of a graphic novel, I removed those specifics and just listed the series title. Apologies to the reviewers of those books.

Some writers included books that were technically published in 2014 and at least 1 just listed best books they read that year, but the vast majority of those lists were 2015 books. The number of non 2015 books in the spreadsheet is very tiny and insignificant to the overall list.

Most of the lists were general ‘best/favourite books’ of 2015, but I also included lists dedicated to young readers, manga, etc… What type list is noted on column B in the spreadsheet.

A small number of lists also had rankings and those are included in Column C.

Here are the websites I used, including the ones with lists broken up into multiple pages.